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Self-reflexive online documentation in the films Catfish, Four eyed monsters and We live in public

Pietersen, Greta (2016-03)

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2016.

Thesis

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: It is widely held that the documentary mode of filmmaking is a subjective endeavor. Bill Nichols identifies an unspoken contract between the viewer and the filmmaker, that what is seen is to be believed. Often, when it comes to documentary films, viewers neglect to acknowledge how the filmmaker goes about in selectively interpreting “reality” for an audience. Bertolt Brecht believed that it is the encoder's responsibility to make the viewer aware of construction processes in a given representation. In this way a critical involvement with the material is ignited and consequently the viewer distances herself emotionally from the representation. Self-reflexive modes of filmmaking foreground the subjective nature of film by highlighting the process of construction. The viewer is thus prevented from suspending her disbelief, and prompted to decode the material actively. These signifiers of reflexivity can be indicated by the overt involvement of the filmmaker and the inclusion of filmic equipment. The presence of the camera is often obvious in reflexive representations, and the viewer becomes acutely aware of how it might influence authentic behavior of the subject filmed. The viewer is therefore not always able to see how a subject might react in her natural environment. The camera essentially represents the presence of an observing other.
The documentaries to be discussed in this thesis all investigate subjects against a backdrop of social and interactive media. On these online platforms individuals are faced with the presence of gazing others who might interact or just voyeuristically observe. Here the subject internalizes the gaze and acts according to how she imagines the desire of the gazing other. The various social networking platforms documented in these films provide the individual with an environment in which she can construct and re-construct an image of self until she attains what she imagines is considered as ideal. A flexible form of narration is thus born due to the technical features characteristic of such online environments. The self might always go back and adapt and further manage/manipulate her image of self as she feels persistently surveyed by a community of gazing equals. Here there exists no gazing hierarchy: everyone is visible to everyone all the time, making selective self-fashioning and subsequent self-documentation challenging. The film and computer screens in which the self sees a reflection of her constructed self becomes something of a mirror: when the self witnesses her own reflection in this screen/mirror, she is faced with psychological processes of self-contextualizing. She must attempt to live up to that which she believes is desired by her societal Other. The self, forever aware of the ubiquitous gazing others in these environments, is always adjusting her concept of self accordingly. Her constant re-adjustment of her mediated self in such environments serves as a form of self-documentation also orientated towards the imagined perception of an other. My thesis surveys the representational politics of the process of producing a filmic documentation of these processes of online self-documentation.